With Kyle Rittenhouse taking the stand in his homicide trial Wednesday, CNN popped the top on a big can of stupid as Zoom masturbator and chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin went off on the teenager, saying he was lucky it wasn’t “illegal to be an idiot.” And along with Jerk-free throwing stones in his glass house, senior legal Laura Coates had the nerve to claim the media have been “sympathetic” to him.
During a break in the trial, Toobin wanted to his “two thoughts” about what he saw in the courtroom to the CNN Newsroom crew. Of course, that involved the 61-year-old lashing out at the teen and mocking him for cleaning up graffiti:
One, what kind of idiot 17-year-old gets a giant gun and goes to a riot? He has no license. He has no training. He thinks he's going to scrub graffiti off with his AR-15? I mean, the stupidity of this. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot went wrong.
“The good news for Kyle Rittenhouse is that he's not on trial for being an idiot,” he chided. “And you know, if it were illegal to be an idiot, the jails would be even more crowded than they are now.”
But given the evidence presented at trial, Toobin had to relent and admit Rittenhouse “it does seem like he has a plausible case of self-defense.”
Roughly an hour before Toobin shattered his glass house with stones, Coates was speaking to Newsroom host Ana Cabrera and lied about the media coverage. “If I was defense, I would have put him on the stand. Because of course remember, the publicity around this trial; there was a lot of sympathetic media towards him,” she said.
She even smeared him as a racist by suggesting he was a “martyr” for stopping civil rights discussions. “People who thought about him essentially as a bit of a martyr from his inflection point on racial tension in America, the idea of the amount of, sort of, GoFundMe-Esque aides that came to his assistance,” she sneered.
In reality, the media wrote off Rittenhouse’s claims of self-defense and portrayed him like a mass shooter who just went there to kill and maim as many people as possible, evening ignoring the video evidence of the people attacking him.
Further, Coates mocked him for breaking down and crying on the stand:
At the same time, if I'm the prosecution, I need him to take the stand for the reasons that came through on the cross-examination. Remember, when he was asked questions by his own attorney you saw the waterworks coming out. He was crying. They had a 10-minute recess. He was overcome with emotion trying to revisit that notion –
Cabrera interrupted Coates because she urgently wanted to play the video of it so they could gawk and enjoy his tears.
Due to the live, breaking news coverage of the trial, there were no ad breaks during this hour of CNN.
The transcripts are below, click "expand" to read:
CNN Newsroom with Ana Cabrera
November 10, 2021
1:02:24 p.m. Eastern(…)
LAURA COATES: If I was defense, I would have put him on the stand. Because of course remember, the publicity around this trial; there was a lot of sympathetic media towards him. People who thought about him essentially as a bit of a martyr from his inflection point on racial tension in America, the idea of the amount of, sort of, GoFundMe-Esque aides that came to his assistance.
At the same time, if I'm the prosecution, I need him to take the stand for the reasons that came through on the cross-examination. Remember, when he was asked questions by his own attorney you saw the waterworks coming out. He was crying. They had a 10-minute recess. He was overcome with emotion trying to revisit that notion –
[Gets cut off to play a clip of Rittenhouse crying]
CNN Newsroom with Alisyn Camerota and Victor Blackwell
November 10, 2021
2:03:33 p.m. Eastern(…)
JEFFREY TOOBIN: Two thoughts. Two thoughts. One, what kind of idiot 17-year-old gets a giant gun and goes to a riot? He has no license. He has no training. He thinks he's going to scrub graffiti off with his AR-15? I mean, the stupidity of this. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a lot went wrong.
The good news for Kyle Rittenhouse is that he's not on trial for being an idiot. He's on trial for homicide and in that respect, I mostly agree where Joey that this is a tough case for the prosecution because it does seem like he has a plausible case of self-defense. And you know, if it were illegal to be an idiot, the jails would be even more crowded than they are now. Homicide's a different matter and you know, he may have a defense here.
(…)
